Distributed, knowledge-based repository for large datasets for biology, food safety and other biology applications

BioWES – Project description

Project BioWes is a collaborative project of University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice represented by Institute of Complex Systems and private company dataPartner ltd. that works on delivery and implementation of information and control technologies. The type of the solution of the project is applied research. Institute of Complex Systems is responsible for the research part of the project focused on biology experiments (see more here). DataPartner is going to deliver database and web based solutions for data management and sharing (see more here).

The project BioWes is inspired by several similar projects that try to solve a substantial contemporary problem of sharing big amount of experimental data. There are several projects that offer the solution for data sharing (for different types of data). The problem is that the amount of data produced by experimentalist is constantly increasing and the speed of internet will always be a step behind. The only way how to share experimental data on between researchers is to share the metadata. Metadata means the overall knowledge about the experiment that consist of detailed knowledge of experimental procedure and knowledge that can be mined from the data automatically or manually by post-processing. The data itself is meaningless without any additional knowledge concerning the experiment. There is no project that can offer experimental data sharing based on the sharing of knowledge.

The main reason why to share the experimental data is to save money and time necessary for experimentation and to compare the results between different experimenters. Data sharing and especially metadata sharing can be understood as the advertisement of the experiments of a particular experimenter. Experimental data sharing and comparison can help to improve experimental procedures and definition of standards in this area.

Project BioWes is focused on the area of biology experiments. These experiments produce one of the biggest amounts of data and impose the highest requirements on the preciseness of experimentation to reproduce the experiment.